Behind the scenes at Performance Bicycle

February 11, 2011February 11, 2011

Getting ready for a photo shoot

Here at Performance, we put a lot of thought, effort and creativity into creating our catalogs and emails. Our creative team works hard to create graphics and imagery that resonate with and inspire you as a cyclist, like with the cover of our latest catalog:A big part of this process are our photo shoots, where we hit the road (and the trails) to show great new gear and bikes in action. Back in our early days, the locations for our photo shoots were usually only as exotic as you could find in a radius of about 15 minutes from our headquarters, like this sweet raingear shot taken on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill! Our models were usually employees (like Chuck Lewis there on the left) or whatever college coed could be convinced to wear a not-so-flattering rain poncho!

Nowadays we travel a little farther afield to get the great images that you’ll find throughout our catalogs and on our website, and our photo shoots can find us anywhere from the mountains of Colorado to the rugged coastline of California. But in the end the process is the same as it’s always been; planning a photo shoot is first and foremost a story of logistics. You’ve got to make sure that you’ve got all the right clothing, gear, bikes and people in place before the first frame is shot by the photographer (and we still do use our employees as models for some shoots, because it’s no good if our models don’t look like they know how to ride)!

This is just a sample of the gear that we packed up for our latest photo shoot, and this doesn’t even include the bikes! As you can see, our creative team has quite the job ahead of them to keep everything and everyone organized over a very busy week of shooting.

And this time we’re going to give you a little behind-the-scenes access to what goes on at one of our photo shoots. We’ll be there on the shoot, taking pictures and video that we’ll post right from our sunny locale in southern California. Look for updates next week on our Twitter and Facebook pages, along with right here on the blog!